9/30/2012

Friday 5 October 6.00 pm, Rom 8, Vaskerelven, Bergen

In connection with the Re:place startup seminar, Jeremy Welsh and Scott Rettberg wil be opening an exhibition featuring a range of works in video, sound, photography and text.

Scott Rettberg shows several collaborative projects, made together with Roderick Coover and Nick Montford. Jeremy Welsh shows Spatial Traces, a video work with sound by Robert Worby, and Places/Traces, a selection of works-in-progress from an ongoing series of investigations of place in video, photography, sound and text. The project consists of several parts, including "SMS Bamboo Forest", an ongoing work combining digital photographs, video and sound, started in 2009 in a Chinese garden in Sydney. Image below from the series Places/Traces (2010 - 2012) a collection of photographs recording traces and remnants, marks, scarrings, abandoned or discarded items and neglected spaces in the urban environment.

Katastrofetrilogien is a trilogy centered on themes of how stories of historic disasters impact contemporary conversations and relationships. Collaboratively and organically constructed, these three films call upon histories of deadly volcanic ash, great floods, and the plague to tell stories of present day longing, anxiety, and environmental change.

"The Last Volcano / Det siste utbruddet"

A story of a catastrophic volcanic eruption and its aftermath is retold by a woman to a man before the slowly turning image of contemporary urban landscape. Though the story seems to reference events of the distant past, its setting and telling raise anxieties related to cycles of memory and forgetting.

A blind date between an American epidemiologist and a Norwegian woman takes place on a transatlantic Skype call. In trying to impress his potential paramour, the American steers the conversation terribly wrong, toward a discussion of the Plague and all the devastating historical memories it entails.

Direction: Roderick Coover

Writing: Scott Rettberg

Translation by: Jill Walker Rettberg,

Voices: Jill Walker Rettberg and Rob Wittig

"Norwegian Tsunami/ Norsk flodbølge"

During a cigarette break on an oil platform in the North sea, a Scottish geologist and a Norwegian chef consider a certain strangeness in the waves, their changing spirits, and the last time a tsunami devastated the nearby shores.

"Three Rails Live" is an experiment in combinatory poetics, a generative system that results in the production of short narrative videos, stories with a moral to them. The three collaborators put the system together at some remove from each other. Coover sent a selection of short video clips and images to Rettberg and Montfort. Rettberg viewed the clips and sorted them arbitrarily into themes (Landscape and Fate, Tourists, Death by Snake, Industrial Sites, Trains, Flood, Toxic, Flight, Stripped, and Third Rail), wrote three short narratives for each theme, and then recorded readings of each of these narratives. Together the narrative segments fit into an overall first-person story of a man considering his memories and his relation to others and his environment late in his life. Montfort selected particular images, and, borrowing a technique from Harry Mathews, wrote “perverbs”—remixes of two different proverbs that subvert the original—for each of the texts paired to an image. Montfort also produced a title generator that arbitrarily creates a title for each run of the work. The system the authors constructed selects two videos and two of the narrative recordings from a constrained random selection. A preverb with a moral to the story is then assigned and the process begins anew. The system thus results in short narrative videos with new juxtapositions of images, texts, and preverbs each time it runs. All of the texts and images emerge from this aleotory but thematically determined method.

Implementation was written collaboratively and sent serially through the mail in the form of eight roughly chronological installments, each consisting of texts on thirty stickers. The stickers were also made available online in different paper sizes, so that people could print them out on standard sheets of business-size shipping labels. Participants attached stickers to public surfaces around the world, so that whoever happened to wander by the stickers could read them. Some of these placements of stickers were photographed by participants, and the photographs were sent back to be archived on the Implementation website.

Because of the origin of this novel on sheets of stickers, and because of the way these stickers have been situated on public surfaces, Implementation consists of 240 short texts, any number of which can be read in any order. In the 2012 book version, all these atomistic texts have been arranged with a cohesive narrative flow in mind. Each page includes placements of the narrative stickers on various public surfaces. It is a book to be read in photographs.

Implementation is about four main characters: Frank, Samantha, Kilroy, and Roxanne, who live in a Midwestern town. The action of the novel begins in September 2001 and runs through the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. One of the characters, Kilroy, is a reservist who is called up and then sent to Iraq, but the other characters are affected in much more oblique ways by the attack on the World Trade Center and the changes that follow. They continue to dine at restaurants, drink at bars, work, worry about their jobs and careers, have flings and relationships, and go to celebrations and funerals. While even a bombing in town changes little on the surface of these lives, the effects of the war can be read in shifts in their gestures, longings, and language. Implementation is a novel about the peripheral, everyday, psychological toll of the war on terror.

9/12/2012

The Re: place project will be hosting a number of guest lectures in coming months, taking place at KHIB. In addition to the guest speakers participating in the inaugural seminar on 12th. October, the following lectures are scheduled:

Artist & film-maker, presenting her recent project "Throw Them Up and Let Them Sing" in which she tracks the journey of Kurt Schwitters through Norway to Ambleside in Cumbria, England, where he constructed his last Merzbau.

Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birbeck College, London, whose research interests include Walter Benjamin and radical philosophy. She is also co-author - originator of the website Militant Esthetix. Esther Leslie contributed to the anthology Restless Cities, a reader on contemporary urban conditions.

9/01/2012

From 11th. - 13th. October the Re: place project will be launched in Bergen with a three day seminar that will include workshop sessions where project participants discuss works in progress; a day of open lectures at KHIB (Bergen Academy of Art and Design); a day trip to the town of Odda in Hardanger, where the exhibition "Odds" curated and arranged by current and former MA students from KHIB is taking place.

The day trip to Odda, on Saturday 13th. October, will focus on the exhibition Odds, as well as the place itself, a former industrial town sited within a dramatic natural landscape of fjord, mountains and glacier. Other places of interest en route include the Art Museum Kabuso in the village of Øystese, where Bergen-based artist Kurt Johanessen will be exhibiting n October.